Don't Count on Chickens

They say that one shouldn't count his or her chickens before they hatch, but hatching is only the first step. After hatching, a chicken has to grow to adulthood before they can start laying eggs of their own or be used for meat. In the meantime, the farmer has to invest a good deal in those chickens. It takes money to feed and house a number of chicks, and any number of those chicks might not live long enough to give the farmer a good return on their investment. That's why, while others say not to count one's chickens before they hatch, I think it may be best not to count on your chickens at all.

Suppose it costs you $100 per day to maintain your farm, and you have 100 chickens which lay an average of one egg per day, and you can sell each egg for $1 apiece. Theoretically, you should break even, but reality almost never sticks to theories. Your chickens could lay a total of more or fewer than 100 eggs on any given day. The value of eggs could vary. Any number of your chickens could die on any given day. If you're counting on each of your 100 chickens to lay one $1 egg per day, you may wake up one morning to find yourself facing severe disappointment.

Life is full of surprises and disappointment, so one shouldn't set too much stock in his or her own plans. Absolutely, you can have a plan. That's fine. But you should also have a backup plan, or be willing to be flexible and/or patient if your plans go awry. Problems often come up when we least expect them to. The trick is to make sure that the problems that upset your plans don't upset you as well.

There are other ways to make money besides raising chickens. If your chicken farm goes under, you might have to try something else for a while. You may get another chance to try and start a chicken farm later down the line, if that's what you really want to do, but you shouldn't count on anything working perfectly the first time you attempt it. It's rare for anyone to get anything right on their first try. It may be best to consider your first failed chicken farm a (probably costly) learning experience, and use what you've learned from your first attempt to help your second attempt go smoother.

But even on your second or third attempt, life is unpredictable and is going to have a lot of ups and downs. Sometimes, things just don't work out. And, yes, that can be disappointing, but they shouldn't be heartbreaking. One shouldn't set their hearts on anything that's not sure to happen, and in this world of uncertainty, it's hard to be certain of anything.

So it may be best not to set our hearts on starting a chicken farm. We never really know how things are going to turn out. So, while we may attempt to do great things and dare to have ambitious dreams, we should try not to be too devastated if not all of our chickens hatch. At least we had one or two chicks hatch, and they were cute while they were ours. Perhaps our next attempt at chicken farming will be more successful. But we shouldn't count on it.

While there is any chance of eggs not hatching, we shouldn't bet our happiness on whether our eggs hatch or not. There are very few things in life that are certain and that we can count on, and we can base our happiness on those things, but our prospects of starting a successful chicken farm are not among them. We can certainly buy more eggs later, if we want to, but next time, we should remember that we can't really count on them to hatch, so we should try not to let our hearts get broken again if they don't.